The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917-1921

Taking a transnational perspective on demobilization this study demonstrates that the experience of mass industrial war generated remarkably similar pressures within both the defeated and victorious countries. Using as examples the important provincial centers of Munich and Manchester, it examines the experiences of European urban-dwellers from the last year of the war until the early 1920s, showing how peace could bring unexpected difficulties to economies and societies that had rapidly and fully adapted to the demands of industrial world war.